Ask HN: What are you using AppleScript for?

I used it (well, Apple events, lower in the AppleScript stack) to generate piles of PDFs for from Quark for clients. Later book automation.<p>It was super handy for that sort of thing.<p>Sort of miss it, in a maybe-masochist kind of way.<p>Open tools to HTML are much nicer. And much less bizarre.<p>If anyone has some hairy InDesign or Quark or Illustrator thing they need automated, let me know.<p>...<p>...personally? lots of useful hotkeys.<p>But the shit keyboards finally drove me away. Linux on a XPS13 now.<p>I don&#x27;t miss AppleScript the language. But I do miss the fact that it was sorta built into everything by default.

Spent the last few years developing my own end-user automation language for rendering templated artworks in Adobe Illustrator. Not written in AppleScript, mind (that language is a junker), but driving AI via the same Apple event interface that AppleScript talks to. Insanely powerful stuff.<p>Currently reimplementing Carbon AEDescs in pure Swift, to see if a modern high-level IPC framework that works across macOS, iOS, <i>and</i> Marzipan apps is feasible. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hhas02&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124763874413174786" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hhas02&#x2F;status&#x2F;1124763874413174786</a>)<p>Developers generally hate AppleScript because it deliberately misleads them into believing Apple event IPC is OOP, then drives them absolutely nuts by acting in all sorts of very un-OO ways. However, once you realize that it’s not OOP at all, but RPC plus simple first-class relational <i>queries</i>… oh the possibilities. Interesting times.

I use it to control some Spotify actions assigned to keyboard shortcuts via Alfred.

mostly use AppleScript with iTunes, such as rating songs playing with Alfred and various Doug&#x27;s AppleScript for itunes. Actually I learn AppleScript by tuning Doug&#x27;s script for my own needs.

Mostly just glue type stuff.